Grades required for RG universities

[Aigle]

What typically are the minimum A level grades required for entry into a non-Oxbridge RG university (say engineering or other science based discipline). And back tracking, what sort of GCSE grades should a student be achieving if they are intending on this path. Sorry, I am not completely familiar with the English system.

I forget why - it's a metric of some variety somewhere - but AAB seems to have ended up being a sort of benchmark tariff.
I don't think that GCSE matter so much with the proviso that (a) you need Eng&Maths at a decent grade and (b) a good reason if the overall number/grades were spectacularly bad. They realise that some students are later in maturing than others.

You can find the specific grade requirement, by institution and subject, on the UCAS course search.

AAB or ABB contextual (if school is in deprived area, has been in RI etc- there’s a list somewhere of these).

Actually, I'll take that back about the GCSE grades. The Universities may not care but I think that most schools want a good GCSE grade before they will let you take an A Level in that subject.

It varies from university to university. For Engineering at Imperial you will need a couple of A*s. Look at the top ten and see what they want.

For a less competitive university AAB or lower will suffice. If you do a language they won’t care too much and BBB or lower will get you onto a very under subscribed course.

Since the cap was taken off the number of students a university can have, they are all now in a ‘bums on seats’ game, including the RG unis. So while engineering at the very top non-Oxbridge unis such as Imperial and UCL require AAA grades, others require far lower grades. Warwick offered my DS ABB.

Apparently Durham is putting on 8am law lectures so they can double their intake by running all lectures twice. This will cause other RG unis to lower their offers. Also the rise of the unconditional offers, started in large numbers by Birmingham, has meant a lowering in A level grades.

Quite what all this does to job offers down the line is quite another matter.

I believe we will see ever lower offers because of Brexit, more 18 year olds questioning the value of a degree that comes with a £50k debt (heading towards the most expensive in the world), yet with no OFSTED style quality assurance, all coupled with the unis' need to fill the lecture halls and accommodation blocks they started planning way back when Tony Blair introduced the idea of 'Uni for everyone', and how now just completed.

This year for engineering DS offered A AA Warwick and Southampton, AAA Nottingham (unconditional if firm), AAA Leeds, and AA* AA Cambridge.

That would be two A* and two A for Cambridge. Hth.

Panda a mate's son was offered AAA for mech eng at Soton. He got ABB and was offered immediately.

Interesting @Blushah. Will see what happens in August!

DD has just got into a RG with a btec 3 x Distinction offer,

If you go onto the What Uni app you can put in the course name and predicted grades and it will tell you which uni offers the course at those grades. It is a really useful tool for "insurance" offers in particular because you can put in lower grades and see what comes up - some are still RG unis for all B offers.

Yes they are all scrabbling for engineers too!

Tony Blair aspired to 50% going to university. It’s inevitable this will lead to variable offers. Basically the higher the requirement, the better the academic standard of the course in Engineering. However that doesn’t mean all grads will be good engineers and plenty go into other jobs and swerve engineering anyway. That’s one reason why we have a shortage!

The lower grades are taken by quite a few universities, but they just won’t tell you in advance. A lower tariff will probably take CCC even if they state BBB!

Like schools, if they cannot fill the courses, it’s time to shut up shop and rationalise.

For engineering DS retook his exams but original was ACD i think and next year was given an unconditional for Portsmouth on that basis, think he could have gone in clearing, but eventually ended up in Surrey on ABB.
None of the universities were bothered that he was retaking and got 5 offers within a week offrom Surrey , Lancaster, Birmingham, Southampton and Portsmouth

I believe we will see ever lower offers because of Brexit, more 18 year olds questioning the value of a degree that comes with a £50k debt (heading towards the most expensive in the world)

Not wishing to be impolite, but - yet another misleading statement about student finance.

Debt is, you have to pay it all back, whatever your circumstances. Repayments on loans taken out from SFE or the other UK equivalents are only initiated once the graduate is in paid employment and earning above (for those on the current scheme) £25 000 pa. And whatever you borrowed, the repayments are taken as a percentage of the income above £25 000, not as a percentage of the amount borrowed and 'debt' remaining at the end of the term is wiped.

Yes, there is a risk that a future government will make the terms less favourable to the student, but it is still a far cry from being £50 000 debt. In the way that, say, having to borrow the same amount to finance one year at a big name US university would be, for example.

Students from our sixth form got in on BBB, BCC and ABD last year to good RG unis.

Yes, there is a risk that a future government will make the terms less favourable to the student...

Considering that something like 80% of debts are never paid off, thus representing poor value to the Tax Payer, and that the interest rate is already usurious, I'd reckon there's every chance the government will 'make the terms less favourable'! And retrospective.

First of all GCSE grades do matter because any offers given are partly based on them - so, for popular courses, as well as having A Level requirements, Unis will have a certain level of GCSEs below which, they simply won't give offers to.

Therefore, in order to get offers you need both good GCSE grades and also good predicted grades.

Once you have got these offers, if you fall short, you may well still get the place, as a number of people on this thread have said. However, if you didn't have the offer in the first place, you are unlikely to get a place on popular course if it doesn't make it to Clearing.

So, from a Uni point of view, if they haven't filled all their places on results day, with candidates meeting their offers, they have 2 choices....accept those they already made offers to but with the lower grades they actually got (and know they are likely to say YES if its their Firm choice) or turn those people down and go to Clearing in the hope of people with the higher grades....with no certainty they will appear. So given it is about funding and bums on seats, many Unis will take a candidate who hasn't quite achieved their offer grades, rather than take a risk.

What does this all mean....it means your GCSEs and predicted grades in some ways are more important than your A Levels themselves...because if you can get an offer in the first place, even if you fall slightly short, you may well be accepted anyway.

One final thing to remember is that many of the people receiving offers and actually taking up places on popular courses will have far in excess of the minimum offer requirement listed. For popular courses you really want to have stellar GCSEs (All As and A*s) and predictions in excess of the offer listed in the prospectus. In the end, if far more apply than places exist, offers will go to those with the best predictions and GCSEs.

It's good to look at unis early as a motivator for GCSE work and its definitledy good to be aware of how important the L6th year is for determining predictions...only starting to think about it in june/July of the L6th is a bit late to realise it would have been a good idea to work harder to get better predicted grades...but then of course the better schools who are used to channelling the majority onto RG courses make sure the kids know this stuff early enough to do things about it. It amazes me though how many schools don't seem to spell it all out to people soon enough - perhaps it's just because they don't expect many to get to RG unis and expect only their few elite to get in. In the end, good grades are needed, there is no getting away from it, but more people with perhaps slightly less good grades get in from schools who push them towards it.

Isnt there usually a minimum Maths and English requirement at gcse . UCL also require a C in a MFL. Imperial used to require B for english, although most others are C.

Yes, there usually is a minimum Eng and Maths GCSE. However, when you are looking at the grade profile required at A Level and the profile required at GCSE for RG Unis, most candidates will have. A/A* in Eng and Maths and not be struggling to scrape a C. I guess there might be an odd candidate who is missing one if those and is re-sitting,mbut it wouldn't be the usual thing with RG candidates who have a large handful of very good GCSEs. Very few places require a MFL.

UCL's MFL requirement is a bit more nuanced than made out above

www.ucl.ac.uk/clie/CourseUnits/Pre-course/MFLrequirement

I think there has been no discussion of which type of Engineering degree either. MEng (Masters undergrad) is now the degree for the more academic. It has a faster qualification route to Chartered Engineer. A BEng can take years and years to get Chartered unless you do a separate Masters. Many universities let you swap from BEng to MEng after the first year if you are good enough. The entry grades required for BEng are lower, as you would expect.

Employment prospects and earnings are very good, especially if you get Chartered. You won’t be unemployed unless you choose to be. The most desirable Engineering courses will ask for the top grades so Imperial, UCL, Sheffield, Southampton, Leeds, Bristol, Manchester are leading RG but do not discount the ex polys that have MEng courses. They can have very strong links with industry/consultancy placements. Make sure any course is approved by the Council of Engineering Institutions. That’s vital.

Sorry - I forgot to add: Engineers should be literate. Many will not have an A*\A (7/8/9) in English language! However being able to write reports, explain concepts to others and make presentations is important. Some of this is personality and ability to learn rather than a high grade GCSE though. Engineering is not purely a mathematical world without language but you can sit designing at a computer all the time if you wish! If you are an old C in maths (5), then forget Engineering!!!

OP worth remembering that the 24 RG universities are not the be all and end all , although one can only be impressed by their slick marketing campaign that has persuaded so many otherwise sensible and rational people that non RG = total disaster. I'd suggest you could count the genuinely selective across the board ones on one hand. Several of the remaining 20 will indeed have a fair number of genuinely selective courses, but a lot of the RG is recruitment "bums on seats" focused.

Bubbles is quite right about doing some research and not being swayed by just the RG badge.

Basically the higher the requirement, the better the academic standard of the course in Engineering.
No, it just means that the other students have higher grades but is no reflection of the teaching you can expect.
Also, Russell Group is not an objective thing, they self selected & did an awesome marketing job. Some actually rank pretty low.